1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technology for evaluating the face recognition performance of a service robot, and more particularly, to a system and method for evaluating the face recognition performance of a service robot using an ultra high definition (UHD) facial video database.
2. Discussion of Related Art
To actively provide individual users with customized service, an intelligent robot should be able to identify and recognize a user first. To this end, as a typical function for human-robot interaction (HRI), a face recognition function of recognizing a user without direct contact with a user is widely used. Due to its excellent performance and convenience, the face recognition technology is most widely used for a robot to identify a user. Face recognition is performed by determining one of previously registered users as being similar to a user present in a screen using image information acquired through a camera installed in a robot.
In Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2006-68796, etc., technology for performing face recognition based on test data provided in the form of a hard disk or a Universal Serial Bus (USB) memory using a face recognition program stored in a memory of a computer and analyzing the performance of a face recognition system based on resultant information is disclosed. However, in such existing technology for analyzing the performance of a face recognition system disclosed in Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2006-68796, etc., operating environment elements, such as the degree of illumination in an environment in which an intelligent robot actually operates, the distance between the intelligent robot and a user who is the target of face recognition, and an angle of the user's face, are not sufficiently taken into consideration, and thus face recognition evaluation results of the system lack reliability.
Other existing methods of evaluating the face recognition performance of a robot include a method using a mannequin, a method using an algorithm, a method using a photograph, and so on. The performance evaluation method using a mannequin has many problems because the coating material of the mannequin is not the same as the skin of a human. The performance evaluation method using an algorithm is a method of evaluating the performance of an algorithm installed in a robot. This method can be regarded as a method of evaluating an algorithm executed on a computer rather than a method of evaluating the overall performance of a robot. The performance evaluation method using a photograph has overcome existing problems, but has a slight problem of manufacturing an installation tool, a difficulty in automatic control interoperation with a computer, and a lack of reproducibility of an actual situation.
Therefore, it is necessary to construct a test environment in which various situations faced by a user and an intelligent robot are created similarly to actual environments, the intelligent robot performs the face recognition function in such environments, and the reliability of the face recognition performance of the intelligent robot can be ensured by analyzing results of the face recognition function.